WOAHH HI THERE!!!!!! A lot of the time there's stuff I wanna add or say about a game I've made after I made it, and I don't care if this makes me seem pretentious or not, I'm gonna ramble about how I made this and what my thought process was.

da idea

This game was made for the 2022 Cultivation Jam. The theme was (surprise surprise!) Cultivation. 

In case you are a fool who never did their Reading Plus or Membean assignments, here's what cultivation means, according to the jam page:

cultivation, noun

1. the act of growing plants 
2. the process of developing a quality or skill
3. refinement, good education and taste

I immediately liked the idea of taking the third definition of cultivation. It reminded me of that time I went to EPCOT during the flower and garden festival. 

They had these booths all around the park where you could buy food, and if you bought specific foods you could get a stamp, and once you had 5 stamps they'd give you a free gift. The free gift was a wonderful mango Dole Whip in a souvenir cup. It tasted like some higher being gave me a cloud plucked from the tropical paradise of heaven, complete with a flower garnish. Unfortunately SOMEONE in my family put said souvenir  cup into a dishwasher, where it promptly got destroyed due to it being made of cheap plastic. I cried over that. I was 17.

BUT ANYWAYS I was tossing the words "refinement," "good education," and "taste" around my silly little head on a plane ride to Ohio (Don't ask) and I eventually came up with something that had all three: A museum. And that was before I even learned about the secret theme.

After I learned the secret theme of "Household Goods," I put two and two together and. Household items in a museum. And fuck it, what if they were teeny tiny? And that's how I got mice.

Looking back, my music taste was probably influencing the mice thing.  Especially listening to the singles of Will Wood's upcoming album (all of which DID make me cry, but that's okay, because crying is healthy.)

makin da rules

So with the idea of mice cultivating a collection household items for a museum, we now just had to work on the gameplay.

I wanted to push myself to make a tabletop game, which was made a little more difficult because of the two additional jam rules for making tabletop games:

- No more than two pages must be required to be physically printed out.
- If only multiplayer, the game must be possible to play with no more than 3 people, and must be playable over VOIP. 

So I ended up building a game that is specifically meant to be played over voice call, which is perfect, because I don't have a lot of irl friends who live nearby and/or can drive over to the local Panera to play a short silly game about being mice. 

Luckily, I have a collection of long distance date night games, and one in particular gave me a big smattering of inspiration: Telemochi!

Telemochi is a puzzle game meant to be played by two players on separate computers, communicating via voice chat. 

So after whipping up the rules and creating some art (nobody told me mice would be difficult to draw) it was just time to...

playtest da game

After a few tweaks, making the relic lists have actual drawings instead of stock photos, and adding the license/copyright, I zipped that baby up and behold... the final game! 

I guess that's really all I wanted to say regarding how I made this, as for any future plans - well, if people like it enough I'll make more relic sheets, and I would ideally like to update the rules to remind players that you really don't need to find the EXACT object if you don't have it, because I did kind of miss that. It's fun when you just have to find something and be like "eh, close enough!"

If I'm feeling particularly motivated, I may make a papercraft/origami set you can print out to showcase your relics in a little shoebox or something. That WAS part of the original plan, but I ended up scrapping it just due to scope. (Also, it'd require printing things out.)

But hey, that's a wrap! I don't know if anyone's ever gonna read this (if you have, thanks! that's 8 minutes of your life that has been added to mine.), but this retrospective was nice to write, and it gives me a nice sense of perspective and makes me feel accomplished. And I'll take that feeling anywhere I can get it! Museum Mice Mix-Up was fun to make, and I'm glad I pushed myself to try something  a little different!

And now if you'll EXCUSE ME I'm going to get a good night's sleep. I've got a big day tomorrow: I'm trying out a recipe for mango Dole Whip.

- nenkaii
Kai Ruiz, 2022
[xe/xem] [they/them]